NASA has crashed a space probe called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) into an asteroid, to try to alter its course
that Earth is threated from outer space sounds, at first encounter, like science fiction. Hostile aliens either do not exist or, if they do, are too far away to matter. But space rocks are real—and some, at least, are too close for comfort. It is less than a decade since residents of Chebarkul, a city in Chelyabinsk oblast, Russia, witnessed the explosion in the atmosphere of a meteorite reckoned to be a mere 20 metres across.
If Earth were hit by something a bit bigger than the Chelyabinsk bolide, the damage could be immense. And there are a lot of candidates out there. TheObservations Programme, a project intended to locate and track so-called Near Earth Objects that are 140 metres across or bigger—of which there are reckoned to be about 25,000—is less than halfway to its goal of cataloguing 90% of them. So far, no immediate threat has been discovered.
To test one possible answer to that question—hitting an incoming bolide with a suitably massive object and thus altering its course—
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